philology (fI’lɒləd3I). [In Chaucer, ad. L. philologia; in 17th c. prob. a. F. philologie, ad. L. philologia, a. Gr. φιλoλoγiα, abstr. sb. from φιλóλoγoς fond of speech, talkative; fond of discussion or argument; studious of words; fond of learning and literature, literary; f. φιλo- PHILO- + λóγoς word, speech, etc.]
1. Love of learning and literature; the study of literature, in a wide sense, including grammar, literary criticism and interpretation, the relation of literature and written records to history, etc.; literary or classical scholarship; polite learning.
It took more than seventy years to create the twelve tombstone-sized volumes that made up the first edition of what was to become the great Oxford English Dictionary. This heroic, royally dedicated literary masterpiece was on its completion in 1928 first called the New English Dictionary; but, with the publication of the first supplement in 1933, it became the Oxford ditto, and thenceforward was known familiarly by its initials, as the OED. Over the years following there were five supplements and then, half a century later, a second edition that integrated the first and all subsequent supplement volumes into one new twenty-volume whole. The book remains, in all senses, a truly monumental work – and with very little serious argument is still regarded as a paragon, the definitive guide to the language that, for good or ill, has now become the lingua franca of the civilized modern world.
Just as English is a very large and complex language, so the OED is a very large and complex book. It defines well over half a million words. It contains scores of millions of characters, and, in at least its early versions, many miles of handset type. The enormous and enormously heavy volumes of the second edition are bound in dark blue cloth: printers and designers and bookbinders worldwide see it as the apotheosis of their art, a handsome and elegant creation that looks and feels more than amply suited to its lexical thoroughness and accuracy.
The OED’s guiding principle, the principle that has set it apart from most other dictionaries, is its rigorous dependence on gathering quotations from the published or otherwise recorded use of English, and employing them to illustrate the sense of every single word in the language. The reason behind this unusual and tremendously labour-intensive style of editing and compiling was both bold and simple: by gathering and publishing selected quotations, the Dictionary could demonstrate the full range of characteristics of each and every word with a very great degree of precision. Quotations could show exactly how a word has been employed over the centuries, how it has undergone subtle changes of shades of meaning, or spelling, or pronunciation, and, perhaps most important of all, how and more exactly when each word was slipped into the language in the first place. No other means of dictionary compilation could do such a thing: only by finding and showing examples could the full range of a word’s past possibilities be explored.
The aims of those who began the project, back in the 1850s, were bold and laudable, but there were distinct commercial disadvantages to their methods: it took an immense amount of time to construct a dictionary on this basis, it was too time-consuming to keep up with the evolution of the language it sought to catalogue, the work that finally resulted was uncommonly vast and needed to be kept updated with almost equally vast additions. It remains to this day for all of these reasons a hugely expensive book both to produce and to buy.
Yet withal it is widely accepted that the OED has a value far beyond its price; it remains in print and continues to sell well. It is the unrivalled corner-stone of any good library, an essential work for any reference collection. And it is still cited as a matter of course – ‘the OED says…’ – in parliaments and courtrooms and schools and lecture halls in every corner of the English-speaking world, and probably in countless others beyond.
It wears its status with a magisterial self-assurance, not least by giving its half million definitions a robustly Victorian certitude of tone. Some call the language of the Dictionary outdated, high-flown, even arrogant. Note well, they say by way of example, how infuriatingly prissy the compilers remain, when dealing with so modest an oath as bloody. The modern editors place the original NED definition between quotation marks – it is a word ‘now constantly in the mouths of the lowest classes, but by respectable people considered “a horrid word”, on a par with obscene or profane language, and usually printed in the newspapers (in police reports, etc.) “b—y”’ – but even the modern definition is too lamely self-regarding for most: ‘There is no ground for the notion,’ today’s entry reassures us, ‘that “bloody”, offensive as from associations it now is to ears polite, contains any profane allusion.’
It is those with ears polite, one supposes, who see in the Dictionary something quite different: they worship it as a last bastion of cultured Englishness, a final echo of value from the greatest of all modern empires. But even they will admit of a number of amusing eccentricities about the book, both in its selections and in the editors’ choice of spellings; a small but veritable academic industry has recently developed, in which modern scholars grumble about what they see as the sexism and racism of the work, its fussily and outdated imperial attitude. (And to Oxford’s undying shame there is even one word – though only one – that all admit was actually lost during the decades of its preparation – though the word was added in a supplement, five years after the first edition appeared.)
There are many such critics, and with the book being such a large and immobile target there will no doubt be many more. And yet most of those who come to use it, no matter how doctrinally critical they may be of its shortcomings, seem duly and inevitably to come, in the end, to admire it as a work of literature, as well as to marvel at its lexicographical scholarship. It inspires real and lasting affection: it is an awe-inspiring work, the most important book of reference ever made, and, given the unending importance of the English language, probably the most important that is ever likely to be.
The story that follows can fairly be said to have two protagonists. One of them is Minor, the murdering soldier from America; and there is one other. To say that a story has two protagonists, or three, or ten, is a perfectly acceptable, unremarkable modern form of speech. It happens, however, that a furious lexicographical controversy once raged over the use of the word – a dispute that helps to illustrate the singular and peculiar way that the Oxford English Dictionary has been constructed and how, when it flexes its muscles, it has a witheringly intimidating authority.
The word protagonist itself – when used in its general sense of meaning ‘the chief personage’ in the plot of a story, or in a competition, or as the champion of some cause – is a common enough word. It is, as might be expected of a familiar word, defined fully and properly in the Dictionary’s first edition of 1928.
The entry begins with the customary headings that show its spelling, its pronunciation and its etymology (it comes from the Greek πQẃ?τoς, meaning ‘first’, and áγωνιστń, meaning ‘one who contends for a prize, a combatant, an actor’, the whole meaning the leading character to appear in a drama). Following this comes the distinguishing additional feature of the OED the editors’ selection of a string of six supporting quotations which is about the average number for any one OED word, though some merit many more. The editors have divided the quotations under two headings.